Flipboard 2.0 Lets You Curate Your Own Stunning Digital Magazines

With the latest version of Flipboard, you can curate and share your own magazines.Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Flipboard remains one of the most beautiful ways to peruse the day’s news, photos and social media sharings. While the first iteration of Flipboard was all about consumption and discovery, today’s update adds a new dimension to the experience: content creation and curation.

Flipboard 2.0 transcends its position as a humble, albeit graphically rich, news reader to become an even more useful tool. You can bend it to your will in a variety of ways, creating an easy, visual way to bookmark content for later, aggregate news around a niche interest or even make a handsome video or audio playlist. Flipboard is going up again a host of apps and services, like Pinterest and Pocket, but all in one package.

The new app still looks and feels, for the most part, like what you’re used to, but adds the ability to create your own magazines, which you can choose to share or keep private.

To build one, simply hit the plus sign found in the lower right-hand corner of a graphic. This pops open a menu that lets you “flip” (yep, Flipboard is actionable now) items into one or more magazines. Anything goes here — examples range from “My Saved Articles” and “Recipes for Later” to “Our Modern Ruins” (a photo collection of abandoned buildings) and magazines dedicated exclusively to, say, cyclocross.

In true Flipboard style, once you’ve flipped a tweet, blog post, Instagram or anything else you want to share, the app organizes it into a browsable editorial spread, complete with a cover featuring a large lead image. You can tweak things like the cover image, if you choose, and since Flipboard added audio in May, you can even flip in music or podcasts to create a soundtrack to your magazine, a nice way to set the tone of your creation.

In addition to the ability to collect and share content through your own magazines, Flipboard also made some UI adjustments that make navigation more direct, as well as making it easier to find new content sources you may be interested in. Each magazine now has a sidebar that pulls links to related content and magazines you may enjoy.

At the top of each page is also another way to unearth new stuff, Content Search. When you search a topic, hashtag or person, your results are laid out in a Flipboard magazine that you can browse or even subscribe to. You can also narrow the search to purely YouTube content, for example.

And for those lamenting the demise of Google Reader, fear not: If you linked Flipboard to Google Reader, all your feeds will be preserved. Whew.

The new Flipboard is an iOS-only update for now. Android users will be able to read magazines iOS users create, but won’t be able to create their own for a while.